This Book Thinks You’re a Math Genius

We rated this book:

$14.95

This is a book of math activities. The tessellation activity wasn’t very hard. Topology Hunt was only okay. Drawing in 3D was frustrating. The volume of my foot is a little over two cups. That activity was good. I didn’t find the Escape the Maze activity very useful. I liked plotting better. Mathematical Guess Who was fun. There’s no skill involved in Game of Pig. It’s probability. I like the pig dice. I like the 3D Perspective Illusion. It was fun.

I found a lot of the activities frustrating. It was hard to wrap the Scytales Strips on the pencil. The math could be explained better. I like math less after reading this book. It’s not a good introduction to math. The middle of the book is fun.

I like the illustrations, including one of the puzzle answers. I also like the bees with the berets and the one with the mustache. One of the pictures is wrong in the table of contents. Why are there red peppers next to some of the activity names?

Older kids and kids really into math might like this book. This would be a good book for teachers to use with students, so they could explain things better.

I found this book really hard to get through and and I had to put it down and pick it up a lot as the story didn’t really fit me. All I could think about was this is what it must be like to read a fake story of Pokemon like when Cars came out and someone copied it trying to make people think it was the same thing. I think kids who really like Dragon Ballz and Pokemon might like this book. Sometimes it seemed the author spent too much time describing stuff and putting so many verbs and adjectives in every single sentence; it just made it hard to get into the story.

I think it would have been a much better graphic novel to tell the story more with pictures and to not have so many sentences overflowing with description. It would easily catch people’s attention and tell a story even without words so even kids who are just learning to read could read it. I don’t think I would spend my money on this book and would have just checked it out from the library instead.

In a town called Split Rock, the members of certain families have super powers. Every leap year, at 4:23 pm, each child in these families who is ten years or older receives his or her unique super power. At age 13, Rafter and Benny finally get theirs, which turn out to be worthless.

They try to learn how to be super heroes despite their terrible powers. They fight crime, like robbery and jaywalking. They need to find out who has sabotaged their powers, however. They have a plan to track down one of the so-called bad guys in the library of their school. This is dangerous because the library has moving bookshelves and the villain has disabled the safety mechanism that keeps people from getting squished. One night, they see a light at the dump at the same time that everyone else’s powers also turn worthless, so they go to the dump to investigate. What happens next is exciting.

There is not a lot of adventure at the beginning of this book, but it is very funny and interesting, which makes you want to read on. Once you are about halfway through the book, the adventure is compelling and you want to get to the end. I recommend it to children who like super hero stories and also to kids who like Eragon, Percy Jackson and HIVE.

This book is about Aphrodite, the very beautiful goddess of love. To stop the gods from fighting over her, Zeus married her off to Hephaistos, but Aphrodite didn’t love him. She went off and had other husbands in this book, and she had a son she named Eros. Eros shot one of his arrows into the heart of Zeus and made him fall in love with a mermaid, Thetis. Her children would be twice as strong as their father, so Zeus marries her off to someone else quickly before he can marry her so her children won’t defeat him. At the marriage party, Eris threw her apple of discord at the three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, and Paris, a mortal, is chosen to give the apple to the fairest one. He chooses Aphrodite and Aphrodite makes him fall in love with the most beautiful mortal woman in the world.

Aphrodite was really rude in this book and really didn’t deserve to be a goddess. I thought it was really funny how they told the story, and how it was only about what happened to Aphrodite. I also thought it was cool how this was comics, in a graphic novel. Even though I didn’t like Aphrodite, I liked the book and want to read the other ones in the series!

Roller Girls: Falling Hard is a story about a girl named Annie Turner who had the difficult choice of staying with her mom in London, or going with her dad, who chose to open up a café in Liberty Heights, Illinois. She chooses to go with her dad and she quickly meets a girl named Lexi who introduces her to roller derby. Annie turns down becoming a cheerleader, something her dad wants her to participate in, to try out roller derby. It is a real-life everyday choice that all kids need to make at some point, doing what we want to do instead of what our parents want us to do. Annie also learns how to adjust to her new school while dealing with the popular girls, and finding her place in the social hierarchy. There was some strong language, but I still really liked this book, I don’t think that the language detracted from the message it was trying to send. I loved this book because it showed how empowered a young girl can be, and this is a great message for us. I hope Megan Sparks continues this series for quite some time!